


to leave our cruelest years

by procrastinatingbookworm



Category: Hollow Knight (Video Games)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Canon Compliant, POV Second Person, Rape/Non-con Elements, Self-Harm, Sharing a Body, Stream of Consciousness, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-24
Updated: 2020-11-24
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:01:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27695257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/procrastinatingbookworm/pseuds/procrastinatingbookworm
Summary: You don’t know if you know how to kill, but you know how to try.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 30





	to leave our cruelest years

**Author's Note:**

> Content Warning:
> 
> This fic operates on the metaphor of sexual assault, from the second-person perspective of the victim. The Radiance's experiences throughout the fic are repeatedly compared to sensations of violation and intrusion. While it is acknowledged that The Pale King is the overarching reason the Radiance has experienced this violation, multiple characters usually seen as only complicit, if not outright innocent, act as aggressors in the assault. These include: the Hollow Knight, the playable Knight, and the Dreamers. 
> 
> If this is not a fic you wish to read, don't read it. If you are triggered by or uncomfortable with descriptions of assault, I strongly suggest you read another fic.

The Wyrm’s Dreamers die without ceremony. 

You feel the seals break, one by one, as though they are impacts on your own body.

(Although what you would describe as  _ your own body _ is more a vague memory, blurred by time and distance and refracted through the Vessel’s mind than an actual sense of selfhood.)

You do not mourn them.

They had no more right to walk in your Dream than the interloper who cut their way through the veil to kill them. For all their uninformed complacency, their incursion was still as viscerally intrusive the moment before they died as it was the first moment you were bound.

They are not your children. They had no place within the Dream—the Dream that was the full extent of you before you had a selfhood or a body. You did not invite them, and you wanted them  _ gone. _

It is an insult upon boundless injury that you cannot even be happy when they are. You know better than to think that the being that killed them did it for your benefit.

They did it to get to you.

They’re a Vessel, like the one that is your prison, and they are breaking the seals so they can reach you. To contain you themself or…

Or to kill you.

The Vessel created to hold you was never given the capacity for speech or sound, but that does not stop you from screaming. Your Infection has burrowed deep into the Vessel’s chest, carving trachea and spiracles into the solid mass of Void.

You scream for all of the crater to hear. For Hallownest’s wretched remains, for all the Infected that have become your children without either of you wanting it, for dear Unn’s children that have come under your wing no matter how hard you tried to keep them safe from this, for the Mantises. For the Root, if she is listening. For the Wyrm, if he still lives to hear you.

The Vessel objects to this thought. The Wyrm cannot be dead. The Wyrm is eternal. 

A long time ago, when you were still raw and flinching from the bond forced between your mind and the Vessel’s, you would have restrained your thoughts to something gentler.

As it is, you have been here so long that the Vessel’s mind—childish echo-chamber of the Wyrm that it is—blurs into yours, and you cannot hide the bite in your retort of  _ Hallownest was meant to be eternal too. _

The Vessel has no retort. There are never any retorts. Only talking points.

(You think you used to pity the Vessel. You don’t know how you feel anymore.)

No longer distracted by the ebb and flow of intrusions into your metaphysical self, your attention is drawn—for the first time in longer than you know—to the body you’ve been forced to share. 

If it were a bug, the Vessel would be dead. 

For all that the Void opposes the Light, your Infection has eaten away at the Vessel; arm and eye and chest consumed and subsumed. The chitinous shell bulges outward, forming translucent bubbles of orange that pulse with the Vessel’s heartbeat.

The Vessel’s head hangs forward, neck nearly at a horizontal, but that was true of it before it was made into your prison. The weight of its pale mask strains its frail, slender body.

It hurts, of course. For as distant as you are from the body, you can feel it. The soul-deep strain on every joint, the fragility that comes of sickness, the sores worn into its chitin from so long spent unmoving. 

(It’s been a long time since either of you have had the strength to struggle.)

The pull on the Vessel’s shoulders that comes from being suspended by the hooks on its pauldrons has been a piercing ache for so long that it no longer registers as pain. 

All the rest of your shared hurts developed, waxing and waning across the years as your prison decayed under your weight and its own, but that particular pain has always been what it is.

(You learned from its memories that the hooks have been in its pauldrons ever since it was clothed. You find that unspeakably cruel. You can no longer count the things the Wyrm has done that you find unspeakably cruel.)

Your instincts tell you to thrash against the chains, to burn the energy you’ve gathered in your stillness to fight yourself free of the chains and flee the thing that is coming to kill you, but you know better. You cannot escape. Not from here. Not like this.

You will have to kill it, before it kills you.

(The Vessel expresses no opinion on the matter.)

You wait.

There is nothing to do but wait. There has never been anything to do but wait.

You used to talk, you and the Vessel. It wasn’t what you’d call  _ polite _ conversation—the Vessel is far too much like its father, though you know it didn’t have a choice in the matter—but it made the endlessness of your invaded Dream and the helplessness of watching everything you know die slowly a little more bearable.

After its arm rotted off over the course of a year, and all either of you could do was watch, you fought, long and violent, for the first time since very early in your imprisonment. You didn’t begrudge the Vessel its anger, but you begrudge it the hurt it caused you.

You wish it would listen to you when you told it that you share an enemy. The same bastard Wyrm took everything from both of you.

The difference, you suppose, is that the Vessel had nothing in the first place—it never knew what it had to lose.

You had so much for the Wyrm to take away.

You’re still waiting. You don’t know how long it’s been. Time stretches thin and unreliable—there are too many layers between reality and you. 

You wonder if you’ll be able to kill. You haven’t killed before. 

The Vessel wonders what counts as killing. You don’t know how to answer. You don’t want to know what it’s killed that it isn’t sure  _ counts _ .

You don’t know how long you wait.

You only know that eventually, the being that killed the Dreamers comes to kill you.

It cuts its sibling’s chains, nailstrike by nailstrike, and you prepare to defend yourself. 

Then it falls, you fall, and smack into the ground with a jolt of pain that is only remarkable for the fact that it is new. You haven’t hit a hard surface before, not since you were forced into the Vessel’s fragile form.

For a moment, you think that you won’t be able to rise—either of you. That your determination will collapse in on itself, that the Vessel will be too weak to fight. 

Then your Vessel’s hand finds its nail-hilt, curling around it. It lifts its heavy head, looks at the thing that wishes to kill you, and—

—and you hurl it backward into an arch, its legs bowing out to accommodate the way its weight shifts and overblances, and  _ scream. _

The thing-that-wants-to-kill-you flinches back, just long enough for the Vessel to raise its nail. Like you, it sees a threat. Not a sibling, not a merciful executioner, but a threat to be eliminated.

You are grateful. You should feel guilty, for being grateful. You know who taught it to defend itself, and why, and what else it learned.

You do not have the strength for guilt, not anymore.

You can only be grateful, and help when you can. When the Vessel backs itself into a corner, you lift it up and bring it down where it can reach the thing-that-wants-to-kill-you. 

You do not feel the Vessel being struck. You know it happens—you can feel it buckling under each hit, closer to collapse with every strike, but you don’t feel it, you don’t feel a thing until the Vessel crumples to its knees, head dropping forward and

and

and you aren’t letting this happen again. You will  _ not _ be trapped again you won’t you  _ can’t. _

You lift the Vessel by its Infection-heavy torso, and when its nail slams into the ground you cast your strength out and  _ pull, _ dragging great pillars of infection up through the floor.

When the thing-that-wants-to-kill-you staggers, you cannot feel guilt or glee, you can only think  _ please, please, please. _

Your assailant strikes out in retaliation and you drag the Vessel backwards, too late, too slow. Infection spatters as the nail cuts through the thin chitin holding it back, and you want to scream but the Vessel wrenches back control and blocks the next strike of the thing that wants to kill you and lashes out in return and

and the thing that wants to kill you leaps into the air to bring its nail down on the Vessel from above and you are  _ afraid. _

You scream and lift the Vessel into the air and slam it down until you hit the thing that wants to kill you and the Vessel doesn’t even object, just raises its nail again and

and drives the nail into its chest and you feel it and you want to scream and make it stop but it just stabs itself again and again and the thing-that-wants-to-kill-you glows as it heals itself and you can’t scream, you can only lift the Vessel in the air and let the Infection that’s more of its body than Void rain down.

You shout into the space your mind shares with the Vessel’s, but it is closed to you. It rips itself open with its nail and you can’t even reach its mind to plead for mercy.

The Vessel falls. Heavily, with finality. The pain comes a second later, sharp and stinging, singing through its face, and then the weight drives against its head. The Wyrm’s only daughter shouts something to your assailant and drives her needle deeper into the Vessel’s head, the thread holding it down, as though it isn’t already dead.

You knew the thing-that-wants-to-kill-you had a Dream Nail. It couldn’t have cut through the veil and cut down the Dreamers otherwise. You knew, but seeing it in their hands still jolts through you sharper than a nail, nearly as sharp

as the Dream

tearing

open.

You spread your wings.

You don’t know if you know how to kill, but you know how to try.

You are free, and furious, and you do not want to die. You carve the air apart with Light, you drag nails from the echoes of the Vessel’s dreams and cast them down on your assailant.

It is as unwilling to die as you are. The Void rises in its wake, rises up to seize you when you fall.

You refuse.

_ You refuse. _

it won’t die  _ why won’t it die  _ it pursues you up through the Dream, unrelenting, borne up by the Void and its half-alive siblings, caught when it falls  _ it’s not fair _

Void and Soul howl from behind its impassive mask and there is no further you can flee, it raises its nail and  _ you aren’t ready to die— _

The tendrils of the Void wrap themselves around you, as if you had the strength to escape. The shades of the fallen Vessels watch from just below you, white eyes staring.

Your assailant does not strike.

A dark mass rises up through the assembled crowd.

The Vessel.

The Vessel’s shade.

The Vessel that you know—that knows you. That shared your mind, your Dream, that almost seemed to listen when you told it that its father was wrong, that fought back against the thing that will kill you.

(You know better than to hope.)

You turn your head toward it.

Its hands sink into your feathers. You twitch and jerk to throw it off but the tendrils of Void squeeze you tighter, hold you still enough for the Vessel to work its fingers deep, deep enough to curl within you and

_ tear _

the one you dared trust holds hole it made in you open as the one you feared lashes you with a barbed limb of Void and you cannot even scream as it tears you apart piece by piece and from what you can still see past the light you bleed is only eyes staring impassive as you die

you don’t want to die you don’t want to die you don’t want to die you don’t want to die you don’t want to die you don’t want to die you don’t want to die you don’t want to die you don’t want to die  _ you don’t want to die you don’t want to die YOU DON’T WANT TO DIE YOU DON’T WANT TO DIE YOU DON’T WANT TO DIE YOU _

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  



End file.
